Plain Concepts and Oath have collaborated with BBVA in the development of the BBVA Valora View, a mobile tool that uses augmented reality to search for housing.

The application which exploits the potential of big data and augmented reality serves to help the user in the complicated search process of the «perfect house» as from the same application you can search, store and classify all the relevant information that is needed to decide the purchase of a property.

In addition to offering the user housing prices, it also offers advice on rent or purchase and mortgage simulations.

BBVA Valora View allows users to point their smartphone camera at a specific building and, through augmented reality, the application informs you if there are any homes for sale or rent on the Idealista website. In addition, BBVA Valora View provides useful information about the property and detailed characteristics of the neighborhood in which the house is located, to know the types of existing housing, as well as the properties available in the area and their estimated valuations.

On the camera image of the mobile, you can see the properties of the area where the user is with augmented reality which change as the user walks.

The application is cross-platform and is available on iOS and Android. Its launch has been very well received, since last May 18th it has reached the number 1 spot for downloads within its category and currently has a rating of 4.2 out of 5.

BBVA Valora View also provides details on the area and the neighborhood, including information on the types of nearby homes, as well as the properties for sale or rent, together with their estimated market value. It offers the user the possibility to store this information, select it and share it with his contacts.

Another feature developed is the smart map, which in addition to allowing access to available homes, incorporates a heat indicator that tells the user which are the most expensive or the most affordable areas in a specific area.

The technology that was used to develop BBVA Valora View was Xamarin. One of the specifications of the project was to have it available on iOS and on Android and with Xamarin, the development time is reduced as with one single language, the application is created for all platforms while the achieved performance is exactly the same as that of a native application.

For the development of the backend, we used C#, which allows us to share code with the development in Xamarin and in turn between the Android and iOS versions using Xamarin Forms.

At Plain Concepts, we are very proud to have collaborated with BBVA and Oath to develop this pioneering application in Europe thanks to the use of the latest technologies and our cutting-edge developments.